Search Results for “Kim Won Hong”

March 26, 2008

More Food Shortages Reported in N. Korea’s Main Grain-Producing Regions; A Grim Mood in Pyongyang

There are two new reports from the Buddhist NGO Good Friends, which has good sources inside North Korea. You will see that I have already blogged about some of the material in these reports when details emerged in press reports, or in the Daily NK. I will just add a few significant details that I gleaned from the reports, which you can find here and here. There are no rations, even in Pyongyang, except for the city center, where they...

Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change

March 5, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem, Part 2

After I wrote here recently about North Korea’s growing meth problem, it occurred to me that I never talked about how, as a prosecutor, I learned how awful meth really is. I spent just shy of two years of my Army time assigned to Ft. Irwin, California, home of the OPFOR. During most of that time, I was the prosecutor, or Trial Counsel. Irwin is a great place to drive a T-72, shoot AK’s, or go out on field exercises...

Drugs & N Korea/Korean Society/UCMJ & SOFA

March 2, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem

North Korea’s government has long been suspected of producing illicit drugs for export. In 2003, a high-level defector testified that the goverment is deeply involved in producing and exporting opiates, including heroin, and amphetamines. North Korea’s official ideology, really “crude, race-based nationalism” thinly veiled in socialism, would have had no problem justifying the poisoning of Japanese and Australian kids, but it was just a matter of time before North Korean drugs found their way into North Korean society. Until recently,...

Drugs & N Korea/Inside NK/Regime Change

February 14, 2008

The Blue House Lied, People Died: How Appeasement Kills in North Korea

Today, the Chosun Ilbo helps us to peel away the myth of unmonitored “humanitarian” aid to North Korea. The aid wasn’t going to the people who needed it the most, and Roh’s government knew it all along. South Korean military authorities have known since 2003, when the Roh Moo-hyun administration was inaugurated, that North Korea has transported rice supplied by the South for humanitarian purposes to frontline units of the North Korean Army. The South Korean military has admitted it...

Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid

September 16, 2007

Review: ‘North of the DMZ,’ by Andrei Lankov

[Update: I’ve since received some responses to specific questions I asked Prof. Lankov, so the discussion should begin either later tonight or tomorrow AM, depending on other stuff I need to do first.] I first read Andrei Lankov’s work when both of us were blogging on NKZone, through his columns in the Korea Times, and through his more recent scholarly works. I imagine that most readers have also read something of those works. The first time I met Prof. Lankov...

Books & Films/Inside NK

North Korea F.A.Q.

Why blog about North Korea? North Korea’s nuclear program and the diplomacy that has attempted to end it for decades are widely covered in the media, but the media has done a poor job reporting the wider North Korea story: its people and their suffering, the society in which they live, and what these things say about the failure of the international community to respond to a grave humanitarian crisis. Those missing pieces of the story are the pieces that...

Comments: 73

Interviews

This blog has been privileged to host some interviews and discussions with some of world’s leading experts and insiders on Korea and policy. I expect to publish more such interviews as time permits. Next up will be Professor Andrei Lankov, a former Soviet citizen who attended college at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, who will discuss his new book, “North of the DMZ.” Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Scholar on Political Economy, American Enterprise Institute (also in Korean); Prof....

Comments: 2

North Korea’s Secrets, Revealed by Google Earth

The Camps New Discovery: Camp 12 Camp 16: Mass Escape Camp 22: Holocaust Now The North Korean Air Force Pyongyang Airport Wonsan Ghost Cities Kim Jong Il’s Largest Palace North Korea’s Nuclear Sites Camps 14 & 18 More of Kim Jong Il’s Palaces

Comments: 11

August 23, 2007

“Famine in North Korea:” An Interactive Review (2 of 3)

[Part I is here.] IV. Aid We will probably never know how many people died in North Korea’s last Great Famine, but can we prevent the next one? This regime seems so indifferent to the suffering of its people — even determined to perpetuate it — that well-meaning aid agencies have been forced to compromise basic humanitarian norms. Those compromises are understandable, but the standards were meant to keep food from being used as a political weapon. The compromises...

Books & Films/Famine & Food Aid

August 20, 2007

The Shenyang Six Are Freed

Do you still remember their story, the arrest of Adrian Hong and the courageous LiNK activists, and the shame on our Consul General in Shenyang? I had given up all hope, but others did not, and their persistence has been repaid with six lives. WASHINGTON, D.C., Aug. 20 – Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) today announced that six North Korean refugees imprisoned by Chinese authorities last December were recently released from a prison in Shenyang. The six – which...

Activism/Refugees

July 21, 2007

The Next Deadlock

The irony of North Korea calling another nation “fascist” can’t be appreciated by those who are missing that gene, confined within North Korea, or both. Maybe this is an f-bomb that could only be built in a place where abductees are no more hostages than their captors. It’s probable that the author’s irony was completely unintentional — that he was oblivious to what Earthlings would think when they read his words: The search [of Chongryon headquarters] was part of an...

Abductions/Six-Party Talks/WMD

July 13, 2007

Law Enforcement Will Be Compromised, Part 2

Law enforcement will not be compromised. ““ Chris Hill, Feb. 27, 2007 [Update: Welcome Wall Street Journal readers.] The latest refutation of this whopper of diplomatic mendacity is an extensive new investigative report on North Korea’s criminal enterprises from Time (thanks to a reader for forwarding). The report suggests that our State Department’s incomprehensible decision to return $25 million of Kim Jong Il’s criminally derived funds, now under GAO investigation as a possible violation of our own money laundering laws,...

Appeasement/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks

June 12, 2007

Win the Battle, Lose the War: How South Korea’s Brilliant Negotiation Skills May Have Killed the FTA

[Update: The USTR will reportedly call for renegotiation of the entire deal, in part to make the draft FTA compliant with U.S. labor standards. More at the bottom of this post.] Absolutely stomach-turning. After all of the Bush Administration’s brave rhetoric about “forced labor” and “material support” for “atrocities,” it ended up signing a free-trade agreement that could very well have allowed slave-made, axis-of-evil Kaesong imports into the United States. Then, because there was no denying the staggering hypocrisy...

Anju Links/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. Politics

May 24, 2007

Anju Links for 23 May 2007

* Can we really separate nukes from human rights? North Korean defectors say that the regime used political prisoners to help prepare its nuclear test. The report is given plausibility by the proximity of the nuclear test site to Camp 16. You will recall that this site may have been the first to publish pictures of that camp on the Web, though it was no more than a matter of finding the place on Google Earth. * This...

Anju Links

May 14, 2007

One Man’s Diplomacy Is Another Man’s Conspiracy (or Chris Hill, Call Your Lawyer)

Whoever [in the United States or in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States] knowingly engages or attempts to engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 and is derived from specified unlawful activity, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). — So here’s something I though I’d never see: U.S. government officials more-or-less openly engaging in a conspiracy that would land anyone else in a federal prison for...

Appeasement/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks

April 26, 2007

North Korea Freedom Week 2007: Bringing Attention to an Unreported Genocide

[Updated below with a report on the Congressional briefing. There was some very chilling testimony today.] [Update, 4/26: Some great news about refugees in Thailand, and a video link to one of Tuesday’s events.] First, please digg this post, and please tell your friends to do the same. For those who don’t know why this issue needs more attention — including yours — please witness Camp 22 and its horrors, learn the grim fate of refugees sent back to North...

Activism/Human Rights

April 16, 2007

Anju Links for 16 April 2007

* My latest K-blog discovery is “Six Happy Feet,” a superb photoblog with a great name. You’ll want to put this one on your blogrolls. It’s hard to read it without concluding that this is just a genuinely nice family. * A Nation’s Conscience. Some South Koreans are demanding freedom for those North Korean refugees in Laos — the ones the South Korean government refused to help. * Heal Thyself, Part 1. I can understand why...

Activism/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Blogs & Blogging/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD

March 31, 2007

Chosen Soren Sues Japanse Government for Malicious Prosecution!

[Update: OK, I can top this. North Korea calls South Korea “fascist” for blocking pro-North Web sites.] This deserves at least a footnote in the Funk & Wagnalls History of Chutzpah. Chosen Soren, a/k/a Chongryon, is a North Korean-controlled organization of ethnic Koreans in Japan. A decade ago, Chosen Soren was a powerful and politically connected organization that poured millions into Kim Jong Il’s accounts through remittances, pachinko parlors, and a network of costly private schools teaching juche...

Abductions/Japan & Korea

Search Results for: Kim Won Hong